-
2. Politics, 1700–1737
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
5 Francis Nicholson was sworn in a s governor of Virginia on December 9, 1698. At this point Virginia’s population was about 62,000, more than any of England’s other North American colonies. But by any measure it was a small place in which a few families dominated its political, social, and economic worlds. In that year some fifty-nine men made up the Council of State and the House of Burgesses. Of that group seven of the leading twenty-one families were represented on the council and eight in the house. Two of the eight chaired two of the three committees of the House of Burgesses; seven were members, one of them serving as the Speaker, and the eighth was the clerk. Over the next four decades the pattern remained the same. Virginia’s political leadership was drawn from this group, and including the next twenty important families makes the view even more striking.1 A change occurred in those forty years, one se en in the gradual transfer of political power from the council to t he House of B urgesses. Challenges from the Burgesses to the council’s authority began early on and continued through almost e very adm inistration. The emergence in the 1730s of t he Speaker of the House of B urgesses as the most powerful political figure in the colony is a clear i ndication of t he shift. This development began with the speakership of Sir John Randolph and continued after his death in 1737 with his successor, P olitics, 17 00–173 7 A “little factious party” and “a very strange sort of men.” —Fr ancis N ichols on, 1705 2 24 A “ Topping P eople” John Robinson Jr. This shift does not mean that political leadership changed in the first half of the century; it was still drawn from the same pool of people. The emergence of this native-born political elite had begun during the last two decades of the seventeenth century. In this same period England worked to increase its control, both political and economic, over its colonies. The appointment of strong governors, with strict instructions, was one manifestation of the mother country’s effort. Many of these governors were military men. In Virginia between 1683and 1749, six of the seven governors had been army officers.2 Nicholson b y 1698 a lready h ad s ubstantial ex perience i n A merica. A fter military service beginning in 1678 in Flanders and continuing in Tangier and with the Portsmouth garrison, he was dispatched to America in the winter of 1686–87 as commander of a company assigned to Colonel Sir Edmund Andros, who was “Captain-General and Governor in Chief of New England.” From that post he moved to New York in 1688 as lieutenant governor, and he t hen held similar positions in V irginia in 1690–92and M aryland in 1692–98. He was forty-three years old and unmarried when he returned to Virginia as governor. His career in America, as Stephen Webb has asserted, had been marked by the effort “to establish both royal authority and its concomitants, social order and security.” Robert Beverley, no friend of the governor, later charged that Nicholson scoffed at the Virginians’ belief that they were “entituled to the liberty of Englishmen,” and the governor himself remarked they were an “obstinate people of Commonwealth principles.” Authoritarian by nature and t raining, he p ossessed a violent temper and seems to have held the people he was going to have to deal with in low esteem. Early on he complained of the scarcity of qualified “natives” to carry out public business and bemoaned the fact that no longer did English gentlemen of “tolerable parts . . . come hither.” He spoke insightfully of the modest antecedents of “this generation” who “derive their originals, either as from themselves or at farthest their fathers, but very few Grandfathers,” and who had acquired their “estates and places of honour . . . more by accident than any extraordinary honesty or ability.”3 Of “this generation,” those with whom N icholson would come i n closest contact were the members of t he Council of S tate and t he leadership in the House of Burgesses. They were a group of mixed ability, but among them were a number of formidable characters. Some, like Ralph Wormeley, were on their last “legs”; Wormeley, who had not attended meetings in several years, died in 1701. But William Byrd I...